


"all you need to know"

by fannishliss



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Women of Supernatural
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-14
Updated: 2013-05-14
Packaged: 2017-12-11 19:44:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/802496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fannishliss/pseuds/fannishliss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>  How did Samuel Campbell make himself known to Gwen and the others?</p>
            </blockquote>





	"all you need to know"

**Author's Note:**

>   part of my Women of Supernatural project.

title: "all you need to know"  
author: fannishliss  
length: 700 words  
rating, pairing: G, none  
warnings, spoilers: none, spoilers for general s6  
note:  part of my Women of Supernatural project.

summary:  How did Samuel Campbell make himself known to Gwen and the others?  
  
~*0*~

The trouble with having a homebase is home invasions.

You can have the best security system in the world, and given enough time, someone will crack it -- especially if they’re human, and your defenses are all laid out in salt and iron and demon-repelling sigils. Especially if  the person who helped design those defenses is the one who means to get in.

But when you open the door after a three-week hunt, you’re ready to relax.  You’re just thinking about the bed where you washed the sheets yourself; the frying pan your mama seasoned years before you were born; the library and the books you’re planning to re-read. 

You’re not thinking that your long lost legendary relative has made himself at home in your cousin’s favorite easy chair.

To his credit, you hear Mark’s safety click off behind you a second after your own. 

“Not a very nice welcome,” the old man says.  You recognize his eyes from the pictures and from the mirror.  He’s definitely a Campbell, unless he’s a monster.  You’re pulling the silver from your hind pocket with your left hand even while you’re still steady as a rock with the .45 in your right. He doesn’t flinch.

“Silver, holy water -- give me what you got.”   His voice is so much like your Dad’s that it throws you, the little mannerisms so much like the crystallized memories of your own Grandpa, his brother: sitting on the old man’s lap as he leafed through the family grimoire, repeating after him the names of the sigils as he pointed out their cruxes, the erasures that would nullify them. 

Your gun wavers and you see it in his eyes.  You tighten up again.  You hand off the knife to Mark as he comes around, leaving you a clear line of fire as he cautiously approaches the sharp-eyed man in the easy chair. 

He casually holds out his left arm and Mark cuts it.  Everyone breathes a little easier as Mark dribbles holy water over the wound.  Nothing.  He really is a man-- but still, he’s a man returned, almost forty years dead.

The night comes down around you like a dream.  You’re sitting at the kitchen table, tipping Dinty Moore’s out of the old enamel pot onto the chipped blue tinware soup plates Mama used to set the table with, pulling a sleeve of saltines out of the old tin Premium box.

His eyes fix on the box, and you remember from childhood the name Deanna scrawled here and there on cracked and yellowing pieces of masking tape. He used to come here with his wife, his daughter Mary. She died the year you were born.

Her death had demon and deal written all over it -- after she’d told her uncles in no uncertain terms to keep the Campbells away from her boys, like she’d somehow gotten away from the things that go bump. Stupid. The Campbells were one of the oldest hunting families around, with generations of gathered lore under their belts, but the girl had wanted out, so whatever.  News trickled along the vine about two rawboned cousins, hunting like rabble:  Winchesters.  You pretty much ignored them as requested until they tried to pull the world down on everyone’s shoulders, and now you’ll do what you have to do, if it comes to that. 

You’re sitting at the table the old man probably sat at with Grandpa when they were boys, listening while Mark asks guarded questions.  Samuel claims he doesn’t know, he can’t remember.  He thinks he was in Heaven, or at least, he can’t recall the alternative, which is probably best for everyone, and yeah, that holy water, so that at least checks out.

Your mind wanders as you remember how Mama and Dad and Grandpa had built this place back up after Mary had left it almost a shack, every iron nail blessed, salt in all the paint, runes and sigils carved on every sill and lintel, sacred herbs outside like a shaman’s pharmacopeia. It’s a Campbell stronghold, and the old man is here because he’s a Campbell. 

You look into Samuel’s dark eyes, and he looks back. He’s family, and that’s all you’ve ever known, and all you need to know. 


End file.
